UNHRC Adopts Resolution on 2014 Israeli War on Gaza

The United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on Friday concerning the Israeli war on Gaza in July 2014, and called on the Israelis and the Palestinians to prosecute war crimes committed during the offensive and to cooperate with the International Criminal Court’s preliminary investigation.

The UN human rights body debated the issue days before the first anniversary of the Israeli brutal war “Operation Protective Edge” that aimed at eliminating the Palestinian will to resist the occupation and liberate the occupied land.

Although the resolution’s text spoke in general terms of “the parties concerned,” it was largely understood to be speaking about holding Israel accountable for possible war crimes.

The 47-member state Geneva forum adopted a resolution, presented by the Palestinian delegation backed by Muslim states, by a vote of 41 in favor, one against (the United States) and five abstentions. All European Union member states, including Britain, France and Germany, voted in favor.

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riad Malki welcomed the passage of the resolution. “There is no path to justice and peace without accountability,” Malki said.

“We will not accept that the repeated crimes [by Israel] against our people go unpunished,” Malki said.

The Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the resolution and stressed that the entity was acting to defend d itself from a murderous terrorist organization, while its Foreign Ministry expressed hopes that EU countries would join the US in voting against it or at the very least to abstain.

The Zionist ambassador to the UN Eviator Manor said that the resolution “is an anti-Israeli manifesto.”

For his part, the ambassador of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to UN, Ibrahim Khraishi, said that everyone was “equal under the law” and that failure to hold the Zionist entity accountable for the war crimes it had committed in Gaza created a double standard.

Prior to the UNHRC vote, British Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Julian Braithwaite, said, “Israel has the right to defend itself against indiscriminate attack, but it is also a principle of international humanitarian law that the use of force in self defense must be proportionate.”

According to the UN, during last summer’s 50-day war, more than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, of which 1,462 were civilians, while the Zionist occupation lost 67 soldiers and six civilians.

A report by a UNHRC fact-finding mission that examined human rights violations during the Zionist Operation Protective Edge in Gaza concluded that both the occupation authorities and Palestinian resistance groups may have committed war crimes last summer.

Friday’s resolution was based on that report, which was published last month. The resolution said there was a “need to ensure that all those responsible for violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law are held to account through appropriate fair and independent domestic or international criminal justice mechanisms.”

It also “called upon the parties concerned to cooperate fully with the preliminary examination of the International Criminal Court and with any subsequent investigation that may be opened” with respect to human rights violations in the Palestinian territories.
In addition, the resolution called on both parties to hold internal investigations into alleged human rights violations.